Researchers also found that senior leaders tend to think they communicate more effectively and act more consistently than their employees think they do. For example, 81% of surveyed managers told Hay researchers that their actions are consistent with their verbal communications, but only 53% of workers thought so.

Only about 20% of workers say their managers coach them regularly to help them improve their performance, and only about 40% say their manager plays an active role in their career development.

There are many factors which contribute to these gaps. Out of these factors, the most important one we found is the ability and the skill set of leaders to get things done (27 % leaders receive no training on essential management skills)

In this article, we have focused on functional skills essential for strategy execution. The behavioural and technical skills required, we believe have direct correlation to the functional skills required to complete the job on hand.

Here are the 20 skills that are essential for leaders to be better strategy executors;

Customer focus (Keeping the customer in mind and in the center of every decision you make and everything you do at work). Ability to identify the persona of both, internal and external customers. Ability to objectively understand customer needs. Ability to make decisions keeping the customer in mind.

Alignment (Aligning individual goals and obtaining buy-ins across the team on the goals and strategies). Ability to involve team members while setting goals. Ability to cascade and align objectives across the team. Ability to convert goals into specific objectives and doable tasks.

Collaboration (Collaborating with people within the team, different departments, levels of organization, and different offices, different areas of expertise and culture to achieve a common goal). Ability to ensure smooth flow of communication across departments. Ability to collaborate along the supply chain to ensure business continuity, Ability to optimise team collaboration to enhance service levels to customers.

Negotiation (Developing strong interpersonal relationships by creating a win-win for team members, vendors and customers). Ability to evaluate alternatives and find the best route to optimally execute. Ability to negotiate with suppliers to find optimal cost & mitigate supply risks. Ability to negotiate with customers to deliver customer needs without burdening the firm with unrealistic expectations.

Continuous Improvement (Exceed expectation and add value to everything that you do). Ability to build a culture of innovation. Ability to encourage out of box thinking, acknowledging and rewarding innovations. Ability to continuously review and work towards stretch goals and targets.

Risk Management (Commitment to mitigate operational risks). Ability to foresee and manage operational risks. Ability to develop appropriate contingency plans to enable quick recovery and avoid inconvenience to customers.

Motivation (Lead by example and motivating your team to execute). Ability to create an environment where all team member are clear about their roles and their contribution towards a common goal. Ability to promote knowledge sharing. Ability to encourage sharing of ideas and creativity.

Mentoring (Effectively transfer knowledge, be compassionate and achieve team’s potential). Ability to nurture and develop potential leaders. Ability to inspire people through knowledge transfer. Ability to ensure continuous learning to plan succession.

Delegation (Assign work, trust and allow space to perform). Ability to accurately assign responsibility to increase efficiency and drive results. Ability to optimally allocate resources based on individual strengths.

Discipline (Being clear, strong-minded and living the process). Ability to live the values and achieve unison. Ability to execute complex tasks in a systematic manner. Ability to be disciplined and strong minded.

Recruitment (Identifying and deploying the right fit). Ability to identify activities, specific tasks, responsibilities and behavioural requirements for all positions. Ability to analyse, assess and hire the right fit.

Planning and Organizing (Ability to prioritise and work on both urgent and important tasks). Ability to prioritise, conceive and develop plans. Ability to systematically execute plans. Ability to continuously focus on short term and long term outcomes.

Communication (Careful listening, prompt & clear top down communication). Ability to actively listen and get complete clarity from leadership. Ability to communicate complex ideas through simpler understandable language and methods. Ability to ensure the message reaches the last person in the link.

Change management (Open to change, being agile and implement change). Ability to judge the scope, effort and impact of the proposed change across your team. Ability to timely and effectively communicate changes by aligning and getting buy-ins from team members.

Performance Enablement (Enabling and ensuring individual and team success). Ability to clearly define metrics which can inspire and accurately measure performance. Ability to conduct continuous evaluation and enable performance. Ability to provide complete clarity and growth opportunities to motivate and attain full potential.

Agility (Willingness to change). Ability to stick to deadlines without compromising service levels. Ability to clearly understand and exceed expectations. Ability to consistently meet changing customer requirements.

Attention to detail (Quality of work). Ability to collate different points of view and take appropriately steps for thoroughness & accuracy. Ability to plan in relative order based on the importance of tasks. Ability to focus on details while not losing track of the big picture.

Handling Tasks (Prioritising and multitasking). Ability to form and understand a logical sequence of the tasks. Ability to understand the complexity and intricacy of the processes and the criticality of task at hand. Ability to allocate and optimally use resources to handle important tasks.

Managing Initiatives (Seeing new initiatives yield desired results). Ability to accurately forecast the resource requirement and allocate accordingly. Ability to effectively judge and going after initiatives which can add value to the organization. Ability to align new initiative to the company’s value proposition.

Bottlenecks (Ensuring smooth flow to deliver on time). Ability to completely understand the processes and systems. Ability to allocate resources to optimally approach bottlenecks. Ability to avoid resource wastage due to repeat activities.

Metis has developed an on-line assessment tool to assess leaders on these 20 essential skills. The assessment tool is based on situational judgement inventories and direct questioning techniques. This tool can be used to assess incumbent leaders and while recruiting for leadership roles. Do write in to us on shweta@metisindia.com or enquiry@metisindia.com for more details.

Context matters. Even though capability required to perform a particular task may seem similar in a given Industry, It can be starkly different. It could vary depending on the organisations location, culture, values, vendors, customers, market and so on…

Our effort is to assist you in identifying contextual capabilities essential for strategy execution. The behavioural and technical capabilities required, we believe, have direct correlation to the functional capability required to complete the job on hand.

We have presented it as a checklist to make sure you address all aspects of contextual capability building.

Please download the document (,pdf) here: 
Leadership responsibility #2 - Contextual capability building (37689 downloads )

“Accountability” is known to most people. One should also know that there is more to it than just writing job descriptions and if incomplete can reduce the chances of implementing your organisation goals by 75%. Accountability should be used as a tool to inspire people to unlock their potential.

Accountabilities are dynamic and constantly require scrutiny and realignment. It should be treated as a relationship building exercise between its people.

The word “Objective” has been extensively used in this document, to imply that all responsibilities and accountability should come with utmost clarity and should contain numbers and timelines.

Accountability should fall to one (and only one) “person” per task, even if the task requires input and contributions from others. Making sure that the “person” understands his accountability, in all and specific situations, that are critical across the organisation.

We have put down important aspects to be well thought-out to ensure accountability for a leader and his team. We have presented it as a checklist to make sure you address all aspects while arriving at accountability.

Download the document (.pdf) here:
Leadership responsibility #1 – Role clarity & accountability (5742 downloads )

My colleague would religiously refer to this quote every time we set out to pursue a challenging initiative. Many a times even when we have embarked on initiatives somewhat similar to what we have pursued before.

This quote is apt, especially, in today’s business scenario where customer requirements are ever changing, requiring organisations to be agile and dynamic. Organisations and its people need to continuously do things that they have never done before.

To do things you have never done before we need to navigate through what we have done before. We have over the years, accumulated many methods and processes that have worked for us. We tend to apply this while executing, in almost every goal that we pursue.

Does this mean that the earlier experiences are not relevant?  In today’s business scenario, we doubt it very much as many of methods and mental models that you built your career on may be irrelevant, incomplete or ineffective. They can be made relevant only when contextually applied to the job on hand. So you unlearn what you already know and learn new ways to get the job done.

“Unlearning” is popularly defined as “to make an effort to forget your usual way of doing something so that you can learn a new and sometimes better way”

Let’s take the game of golf; if you have not pursued sports earlier you would be more likely to pick up the game faster than the person who has been playing tennis, simply because you do not have any preconceived method or process of hitting a ball. The tennis player has to unlearn a fair bit to learn golf!   When we unlearn, we step outside the mental model in order to choose a different one.

In organisations, unlearning is the ability to work on alternative mental model than what we already know. By doing this, we constantly develop new methods and skills to execute agile objectives in this ever changing business landscape.

Imagine a typical organisation where leaders are operating with mental models that may have worked for them earlier, but these may have grown ineffective. We believe this to be one of the contributory factors to execution gaps.

Learning in organisations may not be the problem: it’s unlearning. Mental models are useful when utilised diligently. So, what does it take to unlearn and build newer mental models?

Old mental methods and habits
· Identify all reactions and automatic actions coming from past methods and become aware of it.
· Acknowledge that some methods are outdated and not relevant.
· Let go even if you need to start a fresh.

Creating new methods and ways
· Be open and think beyond the logic you know
· Create new methods to better execute your goals

Making new mental methods a habit
· Catch yourself falling back on the old mental habits
· Follow a routine that encourages new methods
· Reward yourself for every new method

To make new mental methods a habit here is a process that can be followed every time you embark on a new initiative / objective.

“Understanding” the objective, the uniqueness and the big picture.
> Understanding objectively the different “Customer Needs” who are directly impacted by the objective
> Listing out a set of activities to achieve the objective while satisfying customer needs
> Identify and mitigate risks along the defined set of activities
> Identify contextual (on ground) capability requirements along the defined set of activities
> Identify and get buy-ins from collaborators who are required to complete the defined set of activities
> Review the objective and activities every week to improve and make changes

Metis interventions are designed using our Individualised Value Proposition (IVP) method to bring in relevance and facilitate participants to; appreciate, identify, develop and apply skills to achieve individual goals and objectives. The participants need to improvise and think out of the box to get things done. Do write in to us on shweta@metisindia.com  or enquiry@metisindia.com  if you require more details on the methodology.

On the one hand, service is a fast paced job dealing with huge number of parts and ensuring business continuity for customers. They are responsible for maintenance, problem diagnosis and resolution, compliant handling, fire fighting amongst others…  This is what they know and most of them are programmed for problem resolution. On the other, they are required to generate substantial revenues for the organisation requiring a very different mindset and capability. We have seen a huge disconnect while having a conversation with service engineers on revenue generation.

It is only logical for organisations to expect service engineers to generate revenue, but how?

A few thoughts on likely ways to encourage a revenue generation mindset in service engineers:

• As a start point we could replace the word revenue generation to spares generation. As this is in their realm they would most likely relate to it and be open to talk about strategies around it.
• Frequent access to the organisations big picture will result in buy-ins. Appreciating the need to generating revenues from spares and service will ease adaptability and adherence to processes and systems that assist in revenues generation.
• Encourage a solution mindset in service engineers rather than just after sales. This will persuade service engineer to understand customer’s life cycle and identify various touch points which could result in more revenues sources.
• Bring in a strong relevance between service quality and spares generation. Bad service would mean leaving opportunities for revenue generation on the table.
• Focus on developing relationship based selling skills in service engineers and nothing else.

We believe that this is a sensitive matter as after sales business is one of the few constant connections that customers have with a brand, and every interaction shapes their perception of its value. Keeping service engineers focused on customer outcomes and carefully building a structure around revenue generation could be critical. We are currently working with a manufacturing major on building a framework that will ease this transition.

• Strategic intent gives a common purpose, lays emphasis on opportunities to pursue and      inspires    every stakeholder in the organization.
• Strategic intent is usually derived from the company’s vision (or) many a times strategic  intents form the basis for creating a vision for the organisation.
• Strategic Intent directs the organization’s focus, thoughts and actions to the present.
• Strategic intent defines the purpose of your organisations’ existence in the ecosystem. It  defines your actions around growth, operations, innovation and customer.

Strategy execution practices – Organisation goals formalises the key success factors required to execute the intent

• Organisation goals translate the strategic intent into actionable, relevant, measurable goals.
• Organisations goals should be holistic and necessarily span across organisation growth,  operations efficiency, innovation and customer delight.
• Involve all key stakeholders while arriving at organisation goals. Stakeholders buy-in is  critical for business success.

Strategy execution practices – Department goals enable organisation goals

• Key stakeholders across functions and operations must converge and create goals that make  everyone accountable for the execution of the organisation goals.
• Every department / function should involve key stakeholders while arriving at goals and  KRA’s for successful execution.
• Department goals have to be transparent, objective and communicated effectively to all  stakeholders in the ecosystem.
• Each department should necessarily have at least one KRA for every organisation goals. This  way all departments contribute to the overall achievement of the goals.

Follow ups are known to be a “routine” practice at most organizations to ensure things get done. Whether between managers and reportees or among peers, follow ups are considered almost necessary to get things accomplished. Needless to say, the amount of time spent here eats into one’s ability to be “productive”, apart from fueling frustration. This apart, an innate culture of follow ups is bound to hamper the ability to service customers in some form.

So why are follow-ups the norm?

The person has way too many things to do

Very often, we tend to overlook that the stakeholders we want collaborative help from are running behind many things. So, it is imperative that we “communicate” with the stakeholder(s) the importance of the work and how it affects the overall objectives. It is a step forward that we need to take to enable the stakeholders prioritize among the various things that they’re chasing.

Then, there are a set of folks who would term every activity as “urgent” & “priority”. Over time, whatever work comes from these folks are not taken seriously and they land up, many times, like the boy who cried wolf

Mutual trust:

What’s in it for them? Stakeholders who “owe” us work are but merely customers offering an exchange of value. How we “thank”, “reward”, and “recognize” their contribution as well as “repay” them would determine how they react to our needs the next time round.

The person needs help to complete:

Even though a person may be extremely willing to get our work done, (s)he may not really know “what” exactly it is that we require or “how” to go about getting it done.

Again, the impetus lies with us to ensure that we provide them sufficient know how of what exactly it is that we require, how we visualize the output and what essential components we would need as a part of the output.

Even assuming that we give the work to a person that has the required “competencies” to get it done, it is still important for us to call out, in as much detail as possible, the context in which (s)he will be required to apply the skills to get the job done. Time spent towards “enabling” one’s work shall certainly have higher returns than on using the time for mere follow ups.

Organizational political dynamics:

Several times, work to be provided to ‘X’ is always assigned a higher priority than that which is to be provided to ‘Y’. This usually occurs due to the formal / informal power of individuals and skews priorities that in turn have a negative effect on organizational objectives.

Ensuring that prioritization is done based on the “organizational impact” of work rather than the individual assigning the work is a key step towards negating this effect.

Ability to say no & ability to prioritize:

While it’s one thing for us to communicate “importance” & “value”, it’s quite another thing how the stakeholders would perceive them. One’s habit of saying “YES” to everything and the inability to prioritize is another key contributor to one biting off more than they could chew.

Bringing in a “culture” of prioritization through objective impact value assessments of every piece of work, would make it easier for one to be able to choose what to work on and in what order.

Team wins and social networks:

Steps to work as a “cross functional & strategic team” rather than “individual or functional team” goes a long way in sensitizing the importance of every function within the organization. The notion of “no one wins until everyone wins” is essential for one to appreciate and contribute to the other’s success.

Promoting social networks & relationships across the breadth of the organization shall foster a culture of “oneness & unity” which in turn shall help the formation of strong alliances. This by itself would result in a strong competitive advantage for the organization, since not only will it get things done without follow ups, it would begin to think and accomplish greatness beyond expectations.

The person just doesn’t care:

Irrespective of the number of times one is told about the importance of what is required and efforts are made to enable performance, if the response still remains lax lustre, do consider the possibility that the person isn’t just “engaged”.

In essence, the key things from observable behaviours that impact a no-follow up culture are;

• Clarity in communication of end objectives
• Alignment
• Evincing buy ins and building a consensus
• A culture of objective prioritization
• A culture of enabling performance
• Rewarding and recognizing contributions
• A thrust on forging collaborations & alliances

Obviously bringing about a “cultural change” isn’t easy! For all the stakeholders to “behave” in a way that is beneficial to the organization along all the 7 parameters stated above requires a well managed “change” and “transformation” process that is contextual and persisted with over a period of time for the organization to see the benefits!

Real time capability building is about precise and contextual application of skills and knowledge to the present wants of the job. Being agile and constantly working on building aligned and precise skills & knowledge across the organisation is the need of the hour considering the ever-changing landscape of business and the specific needs of people.

Present learning methodologies Vs real time

The capabilities that companies need most have evolved, but methods of building those skills have not. Although traditional approaches to learning have made some impact on productivity, the impact has arguably reached a plateau.

For instance, most interventions are like “Learning-by-studying” where you are to understand the principles and theories, which technically is an accumulated knowledge of previous occurrences. Whereas real time methods could be like “Learning-by-using” where you continuously apply knowledge and skills to better outcomes, which is unique to the requirement at hand and constantly changing. For example – In the process of on-boarding a vendor in manufacturing, ability to negotiate is critical.  Negotiating skills as a theory may be needed, but application differs as shown in the picture below:

Thus, in rapidly changing environments, knowing what customers want has to be a repetitive activity. Building agile methods to acquiring skills and building capability real-time will have a positive impact on productivity in organisations.

If we were to develop real-time capability for the organisation /department / Individual it is imperative to understand the circumstances holistically. We will need to understand output clearly to determine the input.

Challenges to capability building  

A recent global survey result published by McKinsey on building organisation capability shows the biggest challenges faced by organisations.

Interpretation of this report seems to suggest that these challenges are interrelated.  If we were to look at real-time capability building, we would need to actuate most of these factors. For example; Objectivity, buy-ins, alignment, accountability, performance and skill development.

Why should we look at real-time capability building?

Changing business scenarios:

The truth we have to face is the ever increasing demand for high quality reliable products & services required to be delivered within a short span of time at acceptable. This landscape is ever changing and so is the capability to cope with these changes. Your present capability may not be relevant tomorrow.

Holistic and aligned to strategy:

Most organisation leaders know that their organisation should be aligned. They know their organizational capabilities in relation to people, processes and systems should all be arranged to support the organisations strategy.

The challenge is that leaders tend to focus on one of these areas, sometimes based on their comfort areas, but what really matters for performance is how they all fit together and in real-time.

Customer wants:

Although organisation capability must aid strategy accomplishment, it has another important prerequisite, that of being customer centric and satisfy customer needs.  The needs of our customers are constantly changing and so should the capability of the organisation to satisfy them.

Frequent enabling:

Dynamic business scenario and changing customer needs warrants more frequent reviews and capability enablement. Organisations strategies go through constant changes so should the effort to align and enable the capabilities quickly and in real-time.

Engagement:

Frequent interaction and real time capability building activity will bring in objectivity and relevance to everyone’s work. Engaged employees foster collaborative working.

The Sunday night thriller saw the Indian cricket team emerge victorious in a match that went right down to the wire! With the Kiwis requiring 15 runs of the last over, a very doable feat in the game of today, the man entrusted with the last over stuck, with precision, to a key thing called ‘optimal execution’.

Here’re four things that I learnt from Jasprit Bumrah about optimal execution that correlates well with our professional lives, when he revealed what went on in his mind in that exciting last over;

Staying calm – Managing risks:

 “I tried to stay calm. If you try to complicate, then [a] lot of things happen. [I] stayed calm, and [the] job was to execute. It’s important to ‘shut out’ external pressure. I was just focusing on ball-by-ball and kept [the] expectations of people away.” – Bumrah

 Bumrah’s ability to identify ‘pressures’ a.k.a ‘risks” that were specific to him which would impede ‘his’ performance and to be able manage them well during that over is certainly a key learning on risk management for me!

Very often, we remain oblivious to the various things that impede our performance at work; risks we may encounter. It is only likely that we get stressed when a risk materializes because we aren’t prepared for it. Our ability to remain calm certainly has a lot to do with identifying what is going to stress us out!

Risks are not only the management’s problem, it is ours too. Our ability to identify goal centric risks in our own spheres of work, preparing for them and managing them well is certainly a key determinant of our success.

A ball-by-ball focus – The discipline:

 Another thing that struck me in what Bumrah revealed was his attempt to remain steadfastly focused on every ball that he bowled.

 And, business execution is merely that isn’t it? Going about implementing our plan, every single day & moment of our working; staying disciplined and persistent certainly contributes a great deal to our success.

Localized strategy – Contextual application of skills & remaining agile:

 “I tried to look at the batsman till the end, but decided what delivery to bowl just before the release. It was difficult to bowl because batting got easier thanks to the due”, Bumrah said.

 I am quite sure that the Indian team, its coaches and managers would have discussed at length the various things that they needed to do for every NZ batsman who came down to bat. I find this akin to organizational level planning and strategizing.

However, the key was how Bumrah ‘adapted’ his bowling to suit the conditions that prevailed.  This too, I believe, is an intrinsic component of success. Our ability to consider the conditions around us (markets and internal) and to apply our skills to the ‘specific context’ as warranted, however, remaining within the overall paradigm of the organizational strategic boundaries is certainly a critical success factor.

Execution is everybody’s business:

Every organization is merely a sum of the achievements of its employees. It wasn’t enough that Virat and Rohit scored amazing tons and posted a huge score. It wasn’t enough that Yuzvendra Chahal produced a great spell as well. It was required for Bumrah to finish off in the manner that he did, for India to win. So, well, execution is for sure everybody’s business.

So, congratulations to the Indian team! And, a special thank you to Bumrah for sharing what went on in your mind during that over. It certainly taught me a few things about optimal execution!

Whenever I’ve attempted to air anything that is a seemingly contrary point of view on employee engagement, I usually get shut out of the conversation almost instantaneously! How dare I even consider the possibility? How illiterate can I get?

But wait, I haven’t finished! While I do have serious doubts about the ability of all “happy” employees to reign in success, I have no doubt in my mind that all successes result from “engaged & happy” employees. And no, the difference is not merely in the semantics & it has nothing to do with the individual.

Unless “happy” employees are actually translating their “happiness” into performance, what economic sense does it make for organizations to invest in these practices? Although “engagement” multiplies the earnestness of an individual to contribute, are organizations really completing the loop and making the most of this solemnity?

Heard two interesting real life experiences;

• A multi national organization (services) with several thousand employees across the world, scored really (really) high on “employee happiness”. Most people there were “extremely happy” to work for the organization and attrition was low. However, the organization struggled with their CSAT rating for the services they offered.
• Imagine you land up in a very well known electronics retail outlet (a big chain in India) with only few other customers in the store already. The store is well staffed. Yet, even after going around the store for several tens of minutes, visibly perplexed to find something you want to buy, there’s no one who walks up to you to help.Finally you garner the attention of someone who then passionately “tells” you what you “should” buy & doesn’t really lend a ear to what you’re saying about why you want what you want.However, you do manage to convince them to sell you what you want, and finally even end up asking them about how their life in the store is. You manage to find this information from several others in the store as well, as well as in a few other outlets. You figure that most employees are quite happy with the perks and environment that the chain offers them and find it ‘exciting’ to work there! Where would that experience leave you?

Well, in both scenarios, the organizations did a phenomenal job in keeping their employees happy, but somehow “forgot” to complete the loop or tell them what’s expected from them. Perhaps the employees really did not know “how” they could make an impact on success, although I’m sure they were more than willing to do what’s necessary.